Do you know what RGF means? And Dressner wines

1975 was rather late for punch cards. I am pretty sure I was doing TECO at a teletype terminal in 1975.

My (Biochemistry) department went for Mac back in the mid 1980's when the original 128K "toaster" Mac was the hot item. We've been Mac ever since, despite the fact that our building is otherwise a WinDoze environment. The building's sysadmin has been constantly making Mac-unfriendly changes and some time ago it became impossible to use PostScript printing over the building's wires, and no more MacTalk.

At any rate I have learned to love my Mac's and currently I am on a sexy little MacBook with the purple outer space theme on the desktop.

We are a long way from Hollerith here...

F

PS anyone remember Logo, and Turtle Geometry? I made up a nifty set of Roman Capital letters in Logo.
 
I was punching cards in 1978-79 before I learned of the wonders of WYLBUR and SUPERWYLBUR in a basement at U of Chicago, writing JCL instructions to make tapes spin. S0 1975 was not too late.
 
I got my current faculty position in 1977, and I became "the computer guy" when our secretary got an IBM PC a few years later, so that was quite a period of transition. During my first year I remember keeping my grades with pencil and paper. Averaging them all at the end of the semester was a chore, I couldn't afford a four function calculator back then, they were hundreds of dollars. And for the first few years of teaching our exams were done on a mimeograph. The secretary would type on the waxy sheets (IBM Selectric with the rotating metal ball) and I would have to scrape the chemical structures in with a metal stylus.

I guess my point here is that the jump from punched cards to the IBM PC was very abrupt, there was a huge paradigm shift in how offices did things in the 1977-1982 time frame.

F
 
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
I was punching cards in 1978-79 before I learned of the wonders of WYLBUR and SUPERWYLBUR in a basement at U of Chicago, writing JCL instructions to make tapes spin. S0 1975 was not too late.
Click to expand...

Argggh!!! JCL... head... hurts... make it go away!!!

Mark "PTS" Lipton
 
Job Control Language, right? Never did that but did some Assembler on the Commodore.

And I actually never learned WYLBUR but lots of people I knew were using it. If the PC hadn't come in when it did I probably would have been forced to deal with it. But once we had the PC it could do just about anything I needed.

Ah, WordStar. The secretaries left that up all day and the little reminders of the commands were burned into the top and bottom of each monitor screen.

F
 
originally posted by Eden Mylunsch:

It was about ten years later when I purchased my first "personal computer". It was (of course) a beige Mac Plus, with its mighty 2 mgs of RAM. I've continued to purchase Macintosh computers over the years; I think I've owned about 15 of them in various configurations. I don't miss the punch cards one bit (byte?), and I'm in awe of people who have the patience to do programming.
Click to expand...
Joining the geek-fest, my first pc was an Apple IIe with 64k ram (although I nearly bit on a PDP-11 instead). I got my company to upgrade the Apple to 128k so the Fourier decomposition algorithm I wrote for designing a selective order diffraction grating would take less than 4 days of run time to converge. I think it reduced to 3 days. Now I'm fidgety when code takes a few seconds to give results.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
I was punching cards in 1978-79 before I learned of the wonders of WYLBUR and SUPERWYLBUR in a basement at U of Chicago, writing JCL instructions to make tapes spin. S0 1975 was not too late.
Click to expand...

Argggh!!! JCL... head... hurts... make it go away!!!

Mark "PTS" Lipton
Click to expand...

/* This is a comment */
 
originally posted by MLipton:
My first CRT experience was the Textronix 4010, a storage tube terminal that requried manual refreshing.
Click to expand...
Ah, I remember persistent storage tubes. They came in green and amber, and they'd merrily just keep writing over themselves, even when setup to do side-by-sdie columns.

I am pretty sure I was doing TECO at a teletype terminal in 1975.
Click to expand...
I'm sure I am not alone in recalling many a long night at a DecWriter, scrolling the paper backward to see what had been done rather than wait for another round of request/response. I often had the one with the APL ball in it....

SUPERWYLBUR
Click to expand...
That's OSIWYL to you.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top